It didn’t work out that way, though the effects of the switch on circulations was significant.

The decision by
Fairfax Media
to move the Sydney Morning Herald and the Melbourne Age to tabloid format has a different dynamic. Fairfax chief executive Greg Hywood described it as about buying time, and an opportunity to complete the move of the Fairfax metro business into the digital world.

“The issue for the metros is fundamentally moving a mix of print and digital on a journey where your audience is moving digital really fast," Hywood said yesterday.

AFR
AFR

“We have a model that is flexible to take us in to a digital-only environment and capture the print revenues while they’re there.

“Now you’re not going to get there immediately, because there’s still $500 million worth of print revenue but it couldn’t go from where we were to digital-only. Risk-wise you would leave it too late and the cost of doing so would be too much relative to cash-flow."

This is a very different proposition from the wave of newspaper conversions in the past, or even to the plans that then Fairfax chief David Kirk floated (then later abandoned) five years ago to slim the width of the Age and the Herald from 41 cm down to somewhere between the 29cm width of The Times in the UK, the 31.5 cm used by the Guardian’s “Berliner" format or the 34.5cm favoured by TheNew York Times.

Hywood sees the change as a transition, a holding action. Nobody knew when newspapers would be entirely digital publications: “What we’ve done here is provide that option within reach. So therefore you can go compact, then at some stage, and you’ll go through the same sort of process as we’ve gone here…this is under constant review, every week you get your numbers, and every month you look at it, and every three months."

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The cost savings are obvious –smaller pages mean less newsprint and less ink – balanced against the argument that follows with advertisers about the new advertising rates.

Hywood says of the move to tabloid, which is planned for March 2013: “The beauty about this is that there is a digital end-game for these metros."

End game. It’s a chilling prospect for journalists which Hywood redeploys as an upbeat transformative process for the future, at least as he tells it.

There’s an argument that in transformations of this sort, the papers that have benefited most from a change in size have been the ones that embraced the change most radically.

The broadsheet/tabloid debate in Australia has been as much as anything an evolution of an idea. At Fairfax, that was fixed on the golden stream of earnings from classified advertising.

It drove the only real changes in the format of the Herald and the Age in the Twentieth Century, adding an extra column, narrower gaps between columns, less white space, to accommodate more classified advertising per page.

In 1976 that drive was even codified into Melbourne building codes in 1976, the so-called Age cubicle amendment. The then chairman of the Building Appeals Board told the Melbourne City Council that toilet cubicle should be at least 82 centimetres wide, “Because when I go to the toilet I like to read the Age and if you measure it, it is about [82 centimetres]".

With newspapers across Europe moving to smaller sizes, in late 2003 The Independent in London began trialling a tabloid edition while continuing to publish its broadsheet for its traditional readers.

The move proved a runaway success, with daily circulation jumping from 218,000 to 265,000.
Rupert Murdoch
quickly followed suit, converting The Times of London with gains of up to 80,000 sales.

By 2005 the Guardian had also joined the trend, with a move not to tabloid but to a ‘Berliner’ format, popular in European papers, which is somewhere between tabloid and broadsheet. It too found higher sales.

The New York Times moved to compact format at the same time, and was later followed by the Wall Street Journal.

By 2007, however, as newspaper circulations resumed their downward trend, the gloss had come off the newspaper makeovers. It was argued that the circulation gains recorded after the downsizing had been shortlived.

In a comparison of ABC circulation figures for British newspapers from September 2003 against September 2008, the Independent’s circulation had fallen back from its post-change peak of 265,000 down to 251,420. But it was still 15 per cent up from its 2003 sales before the change.

The Times was up just 3.5 per cent at 654,482, while the Guardian had actually fallen 7 per cent to 367,546.

Former Guardian editor Peter Preston argued that the results suggested that while the move to tabloid had been successful, the Guardian’s half-way move to the Berliner format had been a failure.

British newspapers today are in a world of pain. On the May 2012 ABC circulation figures, The Times is down 40 per cent from 2007, the Guardian down 41.6 per cent and the Independent down 62.6 per cent (though its slimmed down version, the i, is up 64 per cent to 274,359, largely on bulk sales).

Australian newspapers have got off lightly – they are down 15 per cent pretty much across the board from 2005. The Courier Mail recorded a 10 per cent gain from its switch to tabloid.

Fairfax’s first moves towards changing format came in the 1990s, when the Newcastle Herald switched to tabloid under editor
Alan Oakley
, but moves to switch the Sunday Age to tabloid as well were blocked by Fairfax’s chief executive
Fred Hilmer
, who wanted to be able to recover the drop in advertising revenues from the smaller pages within a year –and the projections were it might take several years.

“The research was overwhelmingly positive in terms of change," former editor Michael Gawenda said years later.

“But Hilmer was not convinced. So we built the new [printing] plant for the big broadsheet. Now how much are the changes going to cost?"